Tab Atkins wrote:
> While I certainly like many of the abilities that SVG fonts can bring,
> I was under the impression that the problems with them run further
> than what you list.
I'm also wondering about this. The idea of making colour and animation
available to fonts for display settings* is attractive, but I'm not
convinced that bolting SVG into an sfnt structure à la CFF is the way to
go about it. Is SVG in fact a good mechanism for colour and animation in
fonts? Might a better one be defined? If SVG fonts were more widely
supported than they are, then Adam's proposal would be compelling, but
given how wary some of the major players have been of SVG Fonts in
general, I'm wondering if we should be considering options, including
defining something clean and intrinsically sfnt compatible from scratch.
At the W3C gathering in Lyon last year, Christopher Slye (Adobe) and I
had an interesting conversation with Doug Schepers (W3C) regarding
'Fonts 2.0', and the possibilities of W3C working with the font
community to identify what sort of things on screen typography might
need -- both in terms of fancy stuff like colour, and also improving
text reading experience -- and defining these as W3 recommendations.
Although Doug is heavily involved with SVG, it wasn't obvious from the
conversation that SVG Fonts would *necessarily* be the basis for any of
this.
JH
* There are also examples of scripts that are traditionally bi-colour in
text settings to. The most obvious of these is the Ethiopic Ge'ez
script, which has bi-colour punctuation signs in traditional
manuscripts. The Unicode glyph charts show only the black portion of
these signs, which traditionally are augmented with red.